Despite Triage, US Federal Cybersecurity Still Lags Behind

An anonymous reader writes: According to the NY Times, U.S. government officials will soon announce all the improvements their IT security teams have made to federal systems in response to the OPM breach. Unfortunately, says the Times, these updates only just scratch the surface, and are more to show that the government is "doing something" than to fix the long-standing problems with how it handles security. "After neglect that has been documented in dozens of audits for nearly two decades, the federal government is still far behind its adversaries. And it is still struggling to procure the latest technological defenses or attract the kind of digital security expertise necessary to secure its networks." It seems each agency has to be hit by a cyberattack, causing it to go into panic-mode independently, before learning to properly safeguard its systems. Officials say far too much money is wasted on figuring out who and what to blame, rather than on ameliorating the problem. "At the Internal Revenue Service, auditors identified 69 vulnerabilities in the agency's networks last year, but when officials there told Government Accountability Office auditors this year that they had fixed 24 of those problems, investigators found only 14 had been resolved." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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